#11. Play 20 Questions With Your Interface.

Most who have played the child's game "Twenty Questions" realize that linear organization of questions can efficiently pinpoint answers; by beginning with the broadest possible scope of questions (EG "Are you an animal?") children can isolate objects and their locations in very few questions.

It is possible for computerized interfaces to submit questions to end-users in this fashion. It is possible to submit the correct healthcare practice questions (in an organized fashion) to the correct healthcare individuals, who can then answer them more efficiently than if the users, on their own, were forced to sort through a large list of questions that also contains questions not relevant to their jobs.

Since a format to receive the information has already been established at the database level, we merely continue organizing the questionnaire information—submitted on an interface structure—in the same format, forwarded to the end-users. Like dealing face-up cards to poker players, it is possible to submit appropriate questions to individuals without handing them the entire deck of the whole questionnaire.

For example, since everyone has a name (or an alias) that has instantiated their accounts, "What is your name, or alias?" might likely be the first question on an interface structure received by individual healthcare workers; the submitted name field will be different in every case. However, the second question submitted to individuals might be a job title (doctor, nurse, respiratory therapist, or the like); that job title will be similar to some, different from others. We now begin to find differences and similarities to study for the purpose of mining information about users to extract interface specifications to better serve these individuals when a user-centered informatics system is developed.